Stop asking whether AI will replace your doctor

Sponsored Content By North York General Hospital

North York General's AI-enabled SmartER Zones initiative supports clinicians by helping patient flow and care coordination.

By Dr. Everton Gooden, President and CEO, North York General

Artificial intelligence is not going to replace your doctor anytime soon. And that is not where the real opportunity lies.

The promise of AI in healthcare is more immediate. It can give time back to the people delivering care, reduce administrative burden and make it easier for patients to navigate a system that has become increasingly complex and costly.

Put simply, AI should make healthcare more human, not more complicated.

AI is already contributing to advances in medicine, from detecting disease earlier to supporting clinical decisions and research. Canada should pursue those opportunities with ambition. But some of the most meaningful gains may come from making healthcare work better every day.

Consider what it can feel like to move through the system. You are referred for another consultation. You wait. You repeat your story. Information is missing. A test is ordered. Another appointment follows.

The accumulation of these moments defines the experience for patients and consumes the time of clinicians.

Canada is investing significantly in artificial intelligence. The federal government's AI for All approach is intended to turn our national strength in AI into tangible benefits for Canadians. Healthcare should be one of the places where that promise is proven.

Minister Evan Solomon, Dr. Everton Gooden, MP Maggie Chi, and Dr. Kevin Wasko discuss responsible approaches to AI adoption in healthcare.

We should start with problems we already understand and ask how we can solve them better. How can information move reliably with the patient? How can we better connect an open appointment with someone waiting for care? How can we reduce the work that takes clinicians away from clinical judgment?

At North York General, that is how we approached our SmartER Zones work in the Emergency Department. We did not begin by asking where we could use AI. We began with a problem: how could we get patients from the waiting room into care faster?

Over seven months, our Emergency Department cared for nearly 75,000 patients. Despite higher volumes, the average time from arrival to placement in a care zone fell by nearly 28 per cent, from 33.9 minutes to 24.5 minutes. The proportion of patients who left without being seen also declined. In an emergency department, minutes matter. The lesson is simple: do not start with AI. Start with the problem.

That was the focus of a recent discussion at North York General with Minister Evan Solomon, Parliamentary Secretary Maggie Chi and leaders from healthcare, technology, and AI: where can AI reduce complexity now, and how do we do it in a way patients and clinicians can trust?

Trust must be foundational. Patients need confidence that their information is protected. Clinicians must remain accountable for care. Technology should support the relationship between patients and providers, not become another layer they have to navigate.

Canada must also think about scale. The problems we see are not unique to one hospital. A missed appointment, delayed referral or clinician buried in administrative work represents lost capacity wherever it happens.

Leaders from healthcare, government and technology gather at North York General's AI roundtable.

Community hospitals deliver much of the care Canadians rely on and see these pressures firsthand. That makes them natural places to develop and test practical solutions that can work beyond a single institution.

Canada should identify recurring problems across the patient journey, bring healthcare, government, and Canadian innovators together to solve them, and create the funding and pathways to test solutions in real clinical environments. When something improves care, we should be able to scale it across the country.

Because our healthcare challenge is not simply about technology. It is about capacity. We need to get more from the system we already have without continually asking the people working within it to do more.

Sometimes AI's impact will be a medical breakthrough. Sometimes it will be a patient seen sooner, information arriving when it is needed or a clinician having more time for the person in front of them.

All of these advances matter.

The measure of success is not how much AI we use. It is whether healthcare works better because of it.

That is how technology can make healthcare more human.